The present invention relates to a metronome having expanded potential both for indicating musical time and as a teaching aids for musical education, and, more particularly, to a device for teaching musical rhythm and rhythm notation.
Generally speaking, most music students are exposed to melody and rhythm before they begin to study music. Children acquire songs through listening to recordings, radio, television, and children's songs sung by parents and family members. Rhythms may be learned from similar sources, and also from playground games and chants. Thus an innate sense of music may develop before any formal instruction begins.
For beginning students, the placement of notes on a staff bears a spatial relationship to the tune that the notes represent, and there is usually an intuitive understanding of this association. However, the teaching of rhythm involves time signatures and note values that have no spatial relationship, and are thus not as intuitive as melody. For some students, rhythm notation may be an obstacle to early understanding of music, particularly for younger students. Although pedagogical techniques have been developed to deal with this problem, there is a lack of a simple spatial or graphic visual aid for teaching rhythm notation, and for relating that notation to the dynamic presentation of musical rhythm.
For more advanced music students, and for music professionals, the metronome remains a fundamental tool for practice. Aside from the familiar pendulum metronome, there are now electrical and electronic metronomes for keeping time in music. These device are generally characterized as marking time by emitting clicks or beeps or flashes of light at regular, selectable intervals. However, these devices are typically devoid of any display of musical rhythm, and have no means for indicating the proper manner of marking the rhythm of a measure of music.